Dissent: Current System Fails Students

Year after year, bilingual education in public schools has failed America’s students. The classroom is, by far, the most appropriate location to introduce students to American language, history and culture. Bilingual classrooms have served a far different purpose, however. Rather than expose students with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to English, they serve as impediments to integration into American culture and language.

The program is embarrassingly under-funded and under-staffed for the amount of resources and attention required to properly introduce students to English—and sometimes even the basic concept of academics. Bilingual education in America’s schools should be abolished, and whatever funds currently finance the intensely-fl awed system should go toward funding after-school language programs that would supplement the classroom curriculum.

Bilingual education theoretically provides a separate but equal education to students whose linguistic backgrounds differ from the major ity. However, history has shown that while separate but equal education is assuredly separate, it is never equal. We must not hurt the children who our help the most.

—Arianne R. Cohen ’03, Anthony S.A. Freinberg ’04,

Jordana R. Lewis ’02, Paul C. Schultz ’04 and Jason L. Steorts ’03